Technology

If I had to sum up the deepest and most consistent concerns in my communications in writing and other media over the years, it is the desire to elevate the level of discourse about technology in our lives, and to find practical answers to the challenges and pitfalls our tool use poses.

2001

In the Spring of 2001, I spent a couple of weeks in Amish country, talking to Amish about their use of mobile phone technology. They have a time-tested and surprisingly nuanced social system for assessing technologies and deciding whether or how to use them.

1998

I wrote this article in response to John Brockman’s interview with Pattie Maes and her support of the Open Profiling Standard. I also write about intelligent agents and suggest that we consider the implications of the technological tools that we create.

In the sixteen years between my first and most recent collaborations with IONS, I was associated with Xerox PARC, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the online arm of Wired magazine, wrote a syndicated column about technology, even started up an Internet company. Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about technology in terms of three questions: Where are we going? Do we really want to go there? Is there anything we can do about it? Originally appeared in Institute of Noetic Sciences Review.

1996

The archives of the original site, minus the threaded conversations, still exist. In 1995-96, I contracted entrepreneurs’ disease. Convinced that the web needed to become more social, rather than strictly a publishing medium, I was also convinced that people’s online conversations, if facilitated properly, could be refined into publishable content. The idea was to combine what is now known as “user-generated content” with what are now known as “social media.” We would publish editorially curated articles and columns about technology and digital culture, people would have conversations about that material, and the conversations could be selected and reworked by our editors. Contributors to conversations that were converted into published articles would share in the revenues. Time magazine named us one of the ten best websites of 1996, but we depended on humans to sell advertising (this was three years before Google existed), and we were out of business by 1997. It was a huge education for me. First, I learned that being ten years too early with user generated content and social media was financially disastrous. Second, I learned that you CAN give a venture capitalist a plan on a single sheet of paper and they will give you millions of dollars, but they want tens of millions in return (in fact, I learned that it’s better to ask for tens of millions for that reason), and if you don’t return their investment quickly enough, they can kick the legs out from under your venture, sell your office equipment, and put you out of business. I didn’t do another startup. I learned that the art of management in digital enterprises is beyond me: You can get a finance person, a designer, a software engineer, a marketing person together and agree on something, and war will break out between them an hour later because each of these specialties have different definitions for common English terms. People who can orchestrate these specialties are talented. I learned that many intellectuals who have not had to meet a payroll (or fail to meet a payroll) have an uninformed contempt for commerce, conflating mom and pop operations with multinational corporations.

1994

“What we need badly right now is a way for more and more people to see, understand, and decide collectively, through our discussions and our buying and voting decisions, exactly which trade-offs we are willing to make in return for technological conveniences.”

“If you want to maintain independence in the era of large institutions and think fresh thoughts in the age of mass media, you are going to need good tools. Since 1968, Whole Earth Catalogs have transformed the world, one person at a time, by introducing world-changers to world-changing tools.”

In this article I review the book Hand’s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature by David Rothenberg published in 1994 by University of California Press. Whenever I am inclined to think of technology as outside nature, I look at my hand and wiggle my fingers. Technology is built into who we are.

1993

In this article I review the book Great Mambo Chicken & The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge by Ed Regis published in 1990 by Addison-Wesley, an incisive, funny, and prescient look at the transhumanists, who are not only still with us, but who have evolved side-branch of singularitarians.

1991

In this article I review the book Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, & Light by Leonard Shlain published in October 1991 by William Morrow & Company. My friend Leonard Shlain was a great lateral thinker who loved to weave together strands of historical, biological, and scholarly evidence into surprising frameworks for thinking about why the world is the way it is. This was his first. The San Francisco Chronicle sent it to me to review, years before I met Shlain. I gave it a deserved glowing review. When we met, how could he not love me? We took many a walk in the Marin hills, talking about everything in the universe, before he died in 2009.

“I think the opportunities for individual reflection certainly have been diminished because of all the things that we can do during all those times that were formerly down time. I think that’s a matter of concern, for reflection is an important part of every spiritual tradition.”

Scott Rosenberg was one of the earliest print journalists to really understand what the Internet meant, starting when he was a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in the early 1990s, continuing when he was one of the founders of Salon in the mid-nineties, and as a blogger ever since.

“Howard Rheingold is the well-known author of Smart Mobs and many other books describing the evolution of our societies. … As one of the futurologists who can detect the emerging technology trends behind our daily lives, I wanted to know what Howard is thinking in 2006. And he was kind enough to agree for an interview which was conducted by e-mail in mid-June. Below are large excerpts from our exchange.”

“‘I don’t think there is a precedent for something that has spread so quickly around the world to so many individuals; we’re talking about 2 billion phones around the world,’ said Howard Rheingold, digital journalism professor at Stanford and author of ‘Smart Mobs.'”

“In 2002, Rheingold published Smart Mobs, exploring the potential for technology to augment collective intelligence. Now, 7 years later, Howard revisits for the first time the points he made in the book and checks what has and has not happened.”